27
Despite her tiredness, Yaz found sleep elusive that night. The thrill of touching the Path still echoed through her, along with the shock of first the hoola attack and then the Watcher emerging from the storm. And finally the notion that the Ictha might carry the blood of the Missing in their veins. That would make her related to monsters like Theus and all the evils haunting the black ice, but also to the people who shaped such vast cities and filled them with so many marvels.
Her last conscious thought harked back to the beginning of the story she’d told. The part where Mashtri, the trickster god, had covered Zin and Mokka with a green dream and led them astray. She wondered if the same thing had happened to her and her friends. A green dream was leading them across the ice with no certain destination. Could Mashtri be toying with them too, just as she had with the first man and the first woman?
Finally she stumbled into sleep and found herself falling once more, as she had fallen into the Pit of the Missing, as she had fallen into the heart of the city, as Erris had fallen into the void star.
Yaz woke, not surfacing by degrees, but all of a sudden, like plunging into cold water. She lay still, eyes wide, seeing only the roof of the shelter above her, lit by the faint glow from the heat pot. It was quiet, the wind a distant rumour, as if the snow had drifted and entombed them in their fragile house. She could even hear the faint sound of Maya snoring. The girl, so silent in the waking world, was the loudest of them at night, what with her snoring, sometimes gentle, sometimes rough, and her talking, words blurted out here and there, sometimes night terrors where a long string of fevered denials ended with piercing screams.
Yaz didn’t know what had woken her. Something small, but something wrong . . . Suddenly a pressure built around her. When the dagger-fish had dragged her boat under the Hot Sea the water had begun to push on her in much the same way, growing worse with each yard they went deeper. And from one moment to the next Yaz understood the danger.
“Wa—” The din of breaking boards drowned out her warning.
In an instant everything was falling snow, sharp with pieces of board. Yaz tried to rise, tried to swim up through the soft but heavy coldness of the snow load. She saw swirling flakes now, falling from a black sky, all of them the colour of blood. A metal hand or foot stamped down beside her, three-fingered or three-toed. The Watcher had survived plummeting from the ridgetop, survived being buried in an avalanche of ice. It had dug itself out, come after them, and found them.
Yaz and her friends lay half-buried in the ruins of the shelter, finding themselves at the bottom of a pit in the snow, which rose around them on all sides, as deep as Yaz could reach on tiptoes.
The burnished dome of the Watcher’s head loomed over Yaz, orbited by red stars. A hand that was nothing but three long, sharp fingers reached for her. Yaz screamed, despite herself, paralysed in the moment, knowing she would die. Around her the others were scrambling into action. An arm rose from the snow to hack at the Watcher’s leg with an ice axe—Erris pinned to the ground by a great metal foot. Quina and Maya sought their weapons amid the whiteness.
A great white snake, large as an adult coal-worm, broke from the snowbanks and surged between Yaz and the Watcher, coiling around it, trying to drag it back into the thickness of the snow. The Watcher broke through it, scattering whiteness.
Thurin rose to his feet, conjuring a second snow snake from the drifts. A grimace of effort crossed his face and with a crump the snake compacted, drawing in its great girth from six feet in diameter to one foot, becoming an ice snake. This new, denser creation arrowed at the Watcher, striking it mid-torso and hurling it back.
“Yaz!” Erris was beside her, hauling her to her feet with one hand.
She looked wildly around. They were trapped. The collapse of their shelter had left a void in the snow, but in any direction they fled they would have to fight through snow as tall as Yaz and taller where it drifted. The easiest direction led back north along the trough that the Watcher had put in the snowfield on its way to them. But none of them would get far that way. Maya and Quina had risen to their feet, almost unrecognizable beneath the snow caked all over their furs.
Under Thurin’s control the snow flowed like a milk sea, mounding over the Watcher and compacting, layer after layer squeezed down to add to the growing ice shroud already entombing the creature. The ice cracked and ruptured here and there as the Watcher exerted its strength, only for Thurin to pile on more.
“Stay back!” Thurin gestured for them to get behind him.
The ice mound glowed with the bloody light pouring from the Watcher’s eyes, a premonition of the carnage that would follow if it got free. None of them could stand against it. With a mighty effort the Watcher fractured the ice again, a great crack forming as metal arms heaved from below. But Thurin poured fresh snow into the cracks, compacting it into more ice while loading still more on top. The nightmare scene about them seemed fitting: black sky; white snow stained crimson with the light from the mound. If the Watcher broke loose it would be a true nightmare, one from which none of them would wake.
“It’s going to hold!” Quina cried.
“Good.” Thurin sounded exhausted. The snowdrifts, rolling in like waves on the sea to feed his work, were slowing.
“The shadows are moving.” Fear edged Maya’s voice; without it she might have looked ridiculous caked in snow as she was, talking about shadows moving when the scene was all moving shadow and red light. “It’s that thing from the Black Rock!”
“Of course it is . . .” Thurin trailed off when he saw that she didn’t mean the Watcher. A darkness was dimming the red starlight and rising through the ice. A clotted darkness gathered above the trapped Watcher.
“Arges.” As Yaz said it the holothaur’s fear broke across them. Quina, Thurin, and Maya fled along the Watcher’s approach path, tearing into the trampled snow, seeing nothing but their own terrors. Yaz, who had withstood the manipulation before, swung her arm to clear away the threads that carried the emotion out from Arges to infect everyone around him.
“Stop.” Erris spoke through gritted teeth, fighting some internal battle against Arges, who seemed to be trying to disable the mechanics of his body as he had before.
“You thought you could destroy everything I’ve built over so many years?” Arges’s outrage flowed across their minds. “You thought you could take what you wanted and leave?” His dark body pulsed and it seemed that a shape lay within the cloud of his being, a spindly twisted shape that had something in common with the Watcher’s limbs. “Even without Seus’s help I would have freed myself and hunted you down! He could have sent other servants to destroy you but I demanded I be the one. I wanted it more than they did. I wanted to see you bleed.”
Yaz stepped towards him. “You failed before when you had us in your lair. You’re not going to succeed here. You’ve got no body to use and your tricks don’t work on me anymore.”
Arges’s laughter rode the wind. “I don’t need a body. Look at where you are. Without shelter. I’ll watch you all freeze to death. Slower, but still enjoyable.”
Yaz couldn’t think about survival in the open. She pushed the problem from her mind. Right now she needed revenge. She needed to be rid of Arges. The idea that he could stay to enjoy the rewards of the destruction he’d wrought on them could not be borne. If they were to expire in the white death, then it would not be with Arges gloating over them.
Beneath the ice the Watcher’s eyes sang with Arges’s wrongness. Yaz reached out to them, working to change their tune. Arges resisted. He raged and howled around her as her mind grasped each of the eight stars in turn and wrested it from the holothaur’s control. It seemed that his control grew weaker once he left his host, because although it took great effort, and the strain gritted her teeth together, she drove his taint from the stars in a way she had not been able to back in the Black Rock. Next, focusing her will, with her eyes closed against the swirling snow, Yaz pushed the heat sigil at each star. The symbol she’d spent so many nights looking at, the same one that had been stamped upon the heat pot. Then, with each star burning hot, she began to force them up through the ice, the weapons with which she would fight her intangible foe.
Arges’s attack came from an unexpected angle. His misdirection had fooled her yet again—he hadn’t devoted all his strength to fighting her for the stars. Cold hands clamped around Yaz’s neck and Yaz opened her eyes to find herself staring into the face of her only companion not to be sent fleeing into the snow by the holothaur’s terror. Shadow clung to Erris like a second skin, an aura of darkness all about him. Yaz knew that Erris must still be battling Arges for control of his body. If Arges had full say, then he could have simply pulled Yaz’s head off. But this distinction wasn’t at the front of her thinking; that place was dominated by the complete lack of air getting past the awful pressure on her throat.
“Look . . . at . . . me.” The voice that grated out of Erris was not his. Nor was the soul that looked out of his dark eyes. Wherever Erris was he seemed to be losing the battle because the fingers about Yaz’s neck tightened further and she became dimly aware that her feet were no longer resting on the ice but were kicking in the air instead. “Look at me! Your kind die with your eyes open but you so rarely see.”
The need to breathe had grown in an unbearable crescendo but was now fading away into the same blackness that was swarming about her vision like the opposite of snow. Yaz knew she was dying, and the others would die too. And Arges would march Erris’s body back across the vast tract of ice they had crossed and restart his old evils in the Black Rock once more.
She could feel the stars more than she could feel her own body. The first of them burst from the ice with steam jetting around it. She could throw the thing at Erris’s head, maybe break his hold. But to destroy him was too high a price to pay for her life. Instead she let her eyes rest on the star’s light, trying to see through to that place beyond, wondering if it was where she might go when the last beat of her heart was spent.
Suddenly Yaz found herself sprawled in the snow, sucking in air through a throat that seemed too narrow for her needs. Erris lay a few yards away, pinned to the ice by Zox. The iron dog must have burst free of the drifts and shot at him like a thunderbolt. Little else could have broken his grip on her.
Erris struggled to free himself, roaring wordless anger, but Zox’s prodigious weight, anchored to the ice by his rear claws, proved too much for Erris’s conflicted muscles. Yaz rolled to her side, trying to lift herself on her arms but too weak even for that.
The darkness around Erris thickened, blotting out his face, clothing him in a larger spectral body: Arges was making himself known.
“Erris.” Yaz tried to call his name but the word came out too small.
“You can have him back when I’ve finished with him,” Arges hissed, using his own voice, a disembodied thing that insinuated itself into Yaz’s mind. “I need a blunter weapon to crack this nut.”
Arges’s blackness began to pool around Erris’s left hand where it pressed against Zox’s chest, trying to lift the dog. The darkness sank into the metal, staining the iron momentarily before passing through into whatever lay beyond.
“He’s . . . taking . . .” Yaz made it to her knees, her throat still unable to project her words above the wind. She retched, an excruciatingly painful act that spattered stomach acid on the ice.
As the last of the darkness blotted into Zox, the dog became unnaturally still. Erris, regaining full control of himself, managed to slide out from underneath, backing through the snow on his rear until he reached Yaz’s side. “This is bad!”
“W . . . worse than you strangling me?” Yaz rasped.
Erris shot her a guilty glance. “Well, no. But I can’t stop Zox. He’s very strong and basically indestructible.”
Yaz looked at the motionless dog, remembering how he had driven those six-inch claws into ice when climbing the pressure ridge. Their chances had always been slim and had shrunk to zero when Arges had destroyed the shelter. Now it was really a case of how they died, and whether it was fast or slow. She wondered whether Thurin, Maya, and Quina would come back or die alone out in the snowfield.
The eight stars that had been the Watcher’s eyes now hung above the lightless ice mound where the monster lay entombed, each of them trailing steam into the wind as they vaporized the snowflakes impacting them. Yaz touched her aching throat and thought she would rather Zox killed her than be throttled by Erris. That had been very frightening. Quell must have felt something similar when the flood engulfed him beneath the Black Rock and he started to drown. The image of Quell sinking caught in her mind and an idea thrust itself upon her. “Wait!” She got to her feet using Erris’s shoulder for support. She motioned the stars forward. “I can melt the ice around him. I can drown him!”
“He doesn’t need to breathe . . .” But Erris trailed off, understanding. Once the dog was in its own pit of meltwater it wouldn’t be long before it froze in there and it too, like the Watcher, could be left in eternity’s care.
Yaz willed the stars to greater heat. She needed to take advantage of whatever struggle was going on inside the dog’s armour. Even so she hesitated. It seemed a poor reward for Zox’s unstinting loyalty.
“Do it,” Erris urged.
As if unlocked by his words Zox swung his head towards them. His dark eyes fixed them. An instant later he began to shudder, head close to the ice, jolting on his legs as if he were vomiting, though he lacked a mouth. Arges’s blackness spiralled out of him, the holothaur’s scream rising through the registers. There was anger there, yes, but most of all it was fear. Terror. Not projected at them but Arges’s very own. The holothaur tore away, chasing the wind across the pristine snow, howling louder than the gale, as if pursued by all the demons in all the hells. Gone in a heartbeat.
Zox pulled his feet free of the ice, one by one, retracting his claws until no sign of them remained. This done, he slowly rolled his shoulders then looked back at Yaz and Erris with the same patient doleful gaze he’d always had.
Quina chose that moment to stumble back and join them in the dip that the shelter had kept clear. “What just happened?” Snow caked her, hanging from her hair, clumping on her eyelashes. Yaz would have laughed if their situation weren’t so grim.
“Arges tried to take over the dog,” Erris said. He crossed over to Quina and started to brush the snow from her with his bare hands. “The Missing were unsurpassed in being able to subvert other technologies, and Zox is their own creation in any case. The holothaur should have had no trouble owning Zox. He controlled me. Twice.”
A white-caked Maya arrived next, cautious, a blade in her gloved hand. Thurin loomed behind her, dark in his furs, and suddenly she was clear of snow, then Quina, both briefly surrounded by an explosion of white, hurried away by the wind.
“What are we going to do?” Quina hugged herself, shivering. It would be hours before the sun rose.
“We’re dead,” Maya said without fear, still in her battle mode. “The Axit know that the easiest victory comes when you strike the tents rather than the clan. There’s no honour in it. But not all wars call for honour.”
“We have heat . . .” Yaz willed her stars, the Watcher’s eight eyes, closer. Her method of getting heat from them was closer to setting fire to puddled oil than to burning it through a lantern wick. The heat pot was far more efficient, its sigil better drawn than anything Yaz’s mind could impose. But even so, stars this size could blaze for a long time. The wind tore away their warmth but if she stood close . . .
“I can’t go near enough . . .” Quina backed away. Thurin and Maya took a step back too.
“I . . .” Yaz might be able to break the stars into smaller, more tolerable parts, but they would burn even more swiftly. At least the stars gave light. Without them they would be lost in the night.
“We should gather up what we can. Assess the damage.” Erris reached down and tugged a triangle of broken board from the compacted snow by his feet.
Yaz felt for the smaller stars and found them still gathered together, so still inside the heat pot, she assumed. She brought them to her, a dozen stars the size of fingernails popping out of the snow. She set them on glowing orbits around her head and shoulders.
“We need to get out of the wind.” Thurin spoke through chattering teeth and moved with caution. His fear-fuelled escape must have tested the stitches Erris had sewed in his flesh so recently.
Quina scooped up another bit of broken board and snatched the piece from Erris’s hands. She held them edge to edge against the gale. “How do we do that?” she shouted, feeling her own fear now rather than Arges’s and angry because of it. “We’re done. There’s nothing but the wind from now until we die!”
Thurin’s face hardened but the hot words on his tongue were never given voice. Some new thought raised his brows. He reached towards the nearest snowbank with clawed fingers and twisted. Another snow snake emerged, writhing sinuously past Quina, between Maya and Erris. It kept on coming, yard upon yard upon yard, reaching its head up into the full force of the wind and streaming away with it. Thurin staggered and clutched his side with his other hand, weakening as they watched. But their attention was in the wrong place.
“Look,” Thurin said as the snake’s tail finally passed them. He nodded to where it had come from.
“A tunnel!” Maya hurried forward.
The tunnel was floored with the ice sheet and also ice-walled. Somehow Thurin had compacted the inner surface. Yaz followed Maya in, her starlight glimmering off the icy walls. Two yards back the tunnel opened into a dome a little smaller than their shelter. All of them filed in, Thurin last, following an abashed Quina.
They crouched together in a huddle, grateful to be out of the wind.
“Right,” said Yaz. “All we need to do is dig out the heat pot—I know where it is—and a few boards to lie on, and we’re set for the night.”
“For tonight,” Maya agreed. “And for as many nights as there’s snow. After that . . .”
Yaz turned to Thurin, thinking of the time that their shelter had been shrouded with ice overnight. “Could you build us a shelter out of ice?”
“I don’t know. It would be much more difficult.” Thurin frowned. “But maybe.”